Internship Registration Fee in India: How the Scam Works

Is an internship registration fee a scam, and who decides that?

Treat a pre-start fee as fraud. No Indian statute bans internship fees outright, so no single authority hands down a ruling that settles it for you. Before you pay, the decision is yours alone. After you pay, it passes to your bank, to the 1930 helpline network, to a State police force and eventually to a court.

The label on the payment keeps changing. Registration fee. Processing charge. Security deposit. Training kit. ID card and police verification. Laptop bond, refundable on completion. Tax on your first stipend. The wording is decoration; the transaction underneath is the same one every time.

One situation sits outside this. A course you knowingly buy that markets itself with the word internship is a purchase, and a complaint about it goes to a different authority.

What can you decide before the money moves?

Everything, and this is the only stage where one person decides alone. Offers of this kind arrive in a sequence, and each step is a place to stop. The sequence below is drawn from how these offers present themselves; no government advisory cited on this page sets it out as a defined pattern.

1. Contact. A message, an open listing or a group invite. The organisation may be invented, or may be a real company whose name has been borrowed, which is what checking the offer letter against the company register is for.
2. Selection without assessment. An offer arrives quickly, often within a day, with no task, no interview of substance and no reference check. Flattery does the work that screening would normally do.
3. The first payment. Deliberately small, sized so that questioning it feels more expensive than paying it. Once you pay, the operator has learned that you will pay.
4. Escalation. The stipend needs a tax payment first. The certificate needs a verification charge. The refundable deposit needs a processing fee before it can be released. Each demand is framed as the last one.
5. The account. Bank details, PAN (Permanent Account Number), Aadhaar and a signed form are collected for "stipend processing", which places your identity and your account inside someone else's operation.

What does AICTE decide about an organisation that charges?

It can act on its own platform and nowhere else. The All India Council for Technical Education runs the National Internship Portal under the Ministry of Education, tells students the platform costs interns and host organisations nothing, and asks them to report any organisation that asks them for money "in the name of Mentorship, training, skilling, or capacity-building etc." to [email protected].

That address is worth using even when you have lost nothing, since the report is about the listing and not about your loss. A portal notice binds what happens on the portal, not a company selling a training product from its own site. Registration and applications are covered in the step-by-step guide to the National Internship Portal.

What can your bank decide to do, and what is it bound by?

It can flag the transaction, stop further debits and pass the details down the chain. What it is not obliged to do is reverse a transfer you approved yourself. The Reserve Bank circular students reach for, Customer Protection: Limiting Liability of Customers in Unauthorised Electronic Banking Transactions, dated 6 July 2017, does not oblige a refund here.

Its scope is in its title. Zero liability arises where the bank was at fault, or where a third-party breach is reported within three working days of the bank's communication about the unauthorised transaction, which is not three days from the payment itself.

A fee you sent with your own credentials was authorised, whatever the story that produced it. Ask the bank to act anyway, and ask in writing, but ask as a request rather than as a claim. If your account or card credentials went to the operator as well, that is a separate and more urgent call, since an unauthorised debit is then the thing you are watching for.

What does calling 1930 set in motion?

A request to hold the money that travels to the bank at the receiving end. The Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) describes the Citizen Financial Cyber Fraud Reporting and Management System as a module "connecting 85 Banks/Payment Intermediaries and Wallets etc. with the Cybercrime Backend Portal", reached on 1930 or through the reporting portal.

I4C says verified complaints are shared with banks to "trace/freeze funds, send alerts, track mule accounts", from a co-located war room shared with banks and State police, and that the system was launched to prevent siphoning of funds in near real time. Its own advisory of 6 March 2025 puts the instruction plainly: "Report cyber frauds immediately at www.cybercrime.gov.in or by calling 1930."

None of that is a guarantee. A freeze only catches money still sitting in an account the system can touch, and neither I4C page above puts a recovery figure on how often that happens. Treat any paid "recovery agent" who promises a refund as a second operation aimed at the same victim.

Which police force handles your complaint, and what must you give it?

The State or Union Territory force covering the address you enter, and the complaint is not a first information report by itself. The citizen manual published by the Ministry of Home Affairs states that the portal "should not be treated as an FIR", and that complaints are dealt with by the respective State or Union Territory police.

Three documents are mandatory for an online financial fraud complaint: the bank statement from the concerned bank, copies of the SMSs received about the transactions, and your identity and address proof as held in bank records. Registration is by mobile one-time password, valid for 30 minutes, and evidence uploads are capped at 5 MB.

The transaction fields divide the same way, and the optional ones are still worth filling.

Detail the form asks for	How the manual marks it
Transaction ID	Mandatory
Date and time of the transaction	Mandatory
Bank and account number the payment left from	Mandatory
Amount	Mandatory
Receiving bank and account number	Not mandatory

Send the fee demand itself to [email protected] as well, and stop paying. A further payment demanded to release the first one is the escalation continuing, not a way back to your money. The tells that arrive before a fee demand are cheap to check while it costs nothing, and the guide to spotting a fake internship offer lists them.

Who decides whether this was a crime?

An investigating officer first, then a court. Charging money is not by itself an offence; what makes it cheating is the dishonest intention at the time the money was taken. Section 318(4) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 covers cheating that dishonestly induces a person to deliver property, and carries imprisonment "which may extend to seven years", with fine.

Where the operator also posed as someone else, a real company, a named human resources manager or a government scheme, Section 319(2) of the same statute punishes cheating by personation with up to five years, and Section 66D of the Information Technology Act, 2000 adds up to three years and a fine up to one lakh rupees where a communication device or computer resource was used.

You do not have to name a section when you report. Describe the payment, the promise and the identity that was used, and leave the classification to the officer.

Who ends up under investigation if you hand over your account?

You can. An account used to receive other people's money and pass it on is a mule account, and I4C's advisory TAU/ADV/005 warns that "Renting WhatsApp account and receiving illicit funds can lead to legal consequences, including arrest". That advisory concerns rented messaging accounts, but the exposure it describes is what a fake stipend-processing form creates.

Three rules follow. Never receive a payment on someone else's behalf and forward it, whatever the explanation. Never open a bank account at an employer's instruction. Never scan a QR code to link an account for earnings, and check your phone's linked devices if you already have.

Who handles a complaint about a paid programme that under-delivers?

The consumer system rather than the police. A programme you knowingly bought, which then failed to deliver what it advertised, is a consumer grievance under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, described by the National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission as "a benevolent social legislation that lays down the rights of the consumers".

Start with the National Consumer Helpline, which publishes 1915 as its number, open 8 am to 8 pm, with the same number reachable on WhatsApp. If that does not settle it, the Commission gives e-Jagriti as the online route for filing before a consumer commission. Your own college decides separately whether a certificate from such a programme counts for credit.

Which direction does money move in a genuine internship?

Toward the student, or not at all. A real internship pays a stipend, reimburses agreed costs after they are incurred, or offers nothing beyond the work and a certificate. In none of those cases does a student transfer money to an employer in order to begin.

Government schemes make the direction explicit. Under the National Apprenticeship Training Scheme, apprentices receive the government share of stipend by Direct Benefit Transfer into their own accounts. Apprenticeship is a separate statutory category, so it is not a rule to quote at an internship host; only the direction of travel carries across.

An unpaid role is not a warning sign in itself, and whether an unpaid internship is legal is a separate question from fraud. At a nonprofit the same work is often offered as volunteering, which changes the paperwork and not the direction of payment.